by Rock Lane CooperThis is a work of homoerotic fiction. If you are offended by such material or if you are not allowed access to it under the laws where you live, please exit now. This work is copyrighted by the author and may not be copied or distributed in any form without the written permission of the author, who may be contacted at: rocklanecooper@yahoo.com

Note that these stories, including this one, are not an endorsement of unsafe sex. They take place many years before the appearance of AIDS and before it was standard practice to use condoms to reduce the risk of infection from sexually transmitted diseases. Remember always: that was then, this is now. Sex is precious, and so are life and health.

Chapter 11

Mike

Spies had a term for it, Mike knew.
It was called "coming in from the cold." And when he got to thinking about it
all, it was how he thought about Marty that summer.

Mike didn't often speculate
about other men, and didn't have to. He was happy as a man could be with Danny,
and if there wasn't another queer man in the worldand he knew well enough
there were plenty of themit didn't matter much.

Which is why he hadn't wondered
about Marty. Over the years, he'd seen Marty grow up from a feisty kid his
father Wade was always complaining about to a young man with a mind of his own.

He and Mike had never had much
to do with each other. What Mike knew about Marty came from his father, who
liked to brag about the boy, just never seemed to have enough to brag abouteven
though there was a shelf on Wade and his wife's kitchen wall loaded with
Marty's ribbons and trophies and framed photographs of him with his prize
steers and bulls.

"Can't block or tackle or throw
a football for shit," Wade would say. "Always got too much attitude to be a
team player."

"What about his grades?" Mike
had asked. "Maybe that's his strong suit."

"Forget that. He don't care
about book learnin' neither."

Still, it didn't make a lot of
sense. Most fathers would have been happy with a boy like Marty. Maybe you
expect too much, Mike wanted to say, but he thought better of making a remark
that might sound like a criticism.

Wade was a decent man otherwise
and a good neighbor. As Marty grew older, Mike figured his dad would begin to ease
up on him and stop measuring him against some impossible ideal. Hell, nobody
was perfect.

When Marty went off to the university in Lincoln,
Mike kind of lost track of him, mostly because Wade had stopped talking about
him. All for the best, Mike thought. Some time away and some growing up would
probably go some to fix things between the two men.

He hadn't even known about the
year in Alaska.
That's how much Wade had stopped discussing his son. Looking back now, Mike
realized that Wade had written the boy offstopped caringif it was even
possible for a father to do that about his own son.

Tully was the one who finally brought
him up to date, when he told Mike that he was going in for a hernia operation.

"The sucker slips right down
there into my nuts," he said, "and I have to push it back inside me. Doc says
I'm gonna be sorry as all hell if I don't get it taken care of."

"He'd be the one know," Mike
said, the whole idea making him a little queasy.

"Shit," Tully laughed. "You
should see it. Looks like I'm packing a firearm in my shorts."

"Not interested," Mike said, and
he wasn't. Handsome as Tully was, Mike had never once pictured what he might
look like in his underwear, and this was not going to be the first time.

"Who's taking care of your cows?"
Mike asked, ready to volunteer.

"Got that covered," Tully told
him. "Wade's boy Marty is back home from Alaska.
He's been over, and I've been showing him how to run the milkers."

So that was how Mike had learned
about Marty, and for reasons he couldn't really explain he'd started thinking
about the boya man now, reallyas he did his own farm work that summer.

He was at home when the power
went out during the storm that evening. Rich and Ty had cooked up sweet corn in
a big pot on the stove and a skillet of hot dogs for supper, and they'd just
sat down to eat.

Mike had helped them find
candles to set on the kitchen table, and after the power stayed off for a
while, he'd gone to a storeroom to fetch out a kerosene lantern he'd bought
years ago at a farm sale. He lighted it and brought it out to them, the burning
wick in the lamp's chimney sending a warm glow that sent shadows dancing across
the walls.

"There ain't a light out there
anywhere," Rich was saying, standing on the porch with a beer in one hand and peering
through the windows. "The power must be out all over."

That's when Mike thought of
Marty and Tully's cows. When the wind and rain let up some, he had run out and
jumped in his truck. By the time he'd driven the half mile to Tully's place, it
was coming down in buckets again.

The young man was trying hard
not to seem desperate when Mike found him, sitting in his dad's pickup, unable
to even find a light to see by. They'd finished off the last six cows, milking
them by hand, and as they worked together, Marty had started talking. And he
had talked and talked.

There'd been a kind of yearning
in his voice that made him sound lonely for company. Mike supposed that all his
school friends had gone off somewhere looking for lives of their own. And
thirty head of cows night and morning hardly made up for that.

"How come you never got married,
Mike?" he suddenly asked.

It was a question he got in one
form or another all the timeand it was usually in an earnest tone of voice,
from people who believed in marriage like they believed in truth, justice, and
the American way. Even when it was asked playfully, like a waitress he knew at
the B&E, people somehow seemed to think it would be for his own good.

Still looking for the right
woman was a tired and useless answer, since it implied that he wasn't looking
hard enough. Or it meant that no woman was good enough for him, which made him
seem hard to please and full of himself.

Being just a confirmed bachelor
sounded more than a bit old-fashioned in 1972. There were men who stayed
unmarried their whole lives in a previous generation, but that had kind of died
out along with the horse and buggy.

Waiting until he could support a
family may have worked for a younger man, but anyone could see he was making a
good living these days with a farm of his own and several hundred acres in corn
and hay.

Not ready to settle down yet
might have worked as an excuse for a man who wasn't done chasing women, including
other men's wives. But
he'd have to give people reason to believe he actually did that, and one way or
another, he probably wouldn't want that kind of reputation anyway.

Unable to get anyone interested
might have worked as a reason if he was butt ugly, cross-eyed or hunch-backed.
And there was nothing he could do but shyly protest when he'd get a comment
like "A handsome man like you? They must be lining up just to get their hands
on you."

For those who knew about Dannyand it was a fact of his life he didn't
denythere could only be what they
allowed themselves to think about two grown men living together. Since the
general belief was that life in Nebraska
was too wholesome to produce queers, they would have simply scratched their
heads at the oddity of their living arrangement.

And they would have let it go as
something that would some day play itself out in the way God intendedgoing
their separate ways, finding spouses, and raising a bunch of kids. Mike, as he
was often told, would make such a good father.

He could have pulled a long face
at that last comment, suggesting that maybe he had an old injury that disabled
him in the business of fathering, but he didn't want people thinking that
either. It would just make him seem pathetic.

He had pride enough in his
manhoodqueer or notthat being taken for impotent was not an option. Anyway,
like all the rest of his reasons for staying single, it would be a lie, and a
miserable one at that.

So there was the questionfrom
Marty this timeon everyone's minds. How come you never got married, Mike?

"I like my life the way it is,"
he said simply.

He sensed that there in the
quiet and shadowy darkness of the barn, the sounds of the rain outside and the
squirts of milk falling into their two pails, nothing would do for Marty but
the truth.

Marty seemed to think about that
for a while. "I've never had a good friend," he finally said, "of any kind."

Mike wondered at this. It was as
if Marty had not heard what he'd said. Or he had, and it didn't matter enough
to deserve comment. Orand this came to seem more likelyit didn't weigh as
large in Marty's mind as the loneliness of having no friend at all.

"I'm surprised to hear you say
that," Mike said. "Guy like you must have all the friends he wants."

But that didn't seem to be the
case. "Someone gets to know me, and they kinda lose interest," Marty said.

Mike found this all hard to
believe, but he could also tell from the sound of Marty's voice that he was
confiding in him what must have felt to him like the absolute truth.

"That ever happen to you?" Marty
asked.

Mike thought of Don, his best
friend high school. He had loved Don mightily, but Don couldn't love him backnot
the way he wanted. A queer boy, he finally figured out, was going to be
continually up against that.

For the first time he let
himself wonder about Marty. And he remembered it was Marty who'd first brought
up Danny.

"What kind of friend are you
hoping to find?" Mike said carefully.

There was another long pause as
Marty thought about this. "Just somebody I like who sticks by me."

That, Mike realized, was the
simplest and most eloquent way anyone had ever described the way he felt about
Danny.

"There's gotta be somebody like
that," he said. "Somebody who's looking for someone like you."

"I kinda doubt it. I think they
would've found me by now."

"Oh, I wouldn't give up just
yet," Mike said, thinking of how long it had taken him and Danny to find each
other. "There's still time."

Marty didn't seem to have
anything to say to that.

Mike had finished with his cow
and went to dump his milk pail in the bulk tank. Mostly he was thinking about
Marty's father, who had been a good neighbor, ever since Mike had started
farming here, renting and then buying his place from old man Farquhar.

Wade had loaned him tools and
equipment over the years and helped him out, sometimes with advice about
farming and the markets. He'd known the ins and outs of the federal farm
program, the same one that had brought Danny to him that summer with his
measuring tape and together they had walked the length and breadth of his
cornfields.

He felt a loyalty to Wade,
because the man trusted him without question. And he was concerned now that
anything he might say to Marty would betray that trust. While from the looks of
it father and son were not on the best of terms, he didn't want to interfere
either. It was always best not to go sticking your nose into another man's
business.

"Does Tully have a generator?"
he asked when he came back.

"I don't know."

"Well, I got one over at my
place," he said. "If the power stays off any longer, we're gonna need it to run
the cooler on that tank."

He moved his bucket to the next
cow in line and set the pail under her udder. She took a step away from him at
the touch of his hand.

"Whoa, boss, whoa," he said. "This
ain't easy for me either."

They finished milking the cows
and released them from the stanchions, letting them head one at a time out of
the barn, and Marty opened the gate that held the rest of them in the shed.

The rain was no more than a
light drizzle now, and as Marty walked across the muddy corral to open the gate
into the pasture, he disappeared into a darkness that seemed to swallow him up
whole.

When he came back, Mike said,
"I'm gonna go over to my place and get that generator."

"I'll come along with you,"
Marty said. "Give you a hand with it."

So they went out to Mike's
truck, following the beam of the flashlight. Marty stopped before he got in. "Damn,
I got mud all over my shoes."

"Don't worry about that," Mike
said. "It's just my truck. I left the limousine at home."

Marty laughed and they got in.
When Mike switched on the headlights, the burst of illumination that flooded
across the ground in front of them seemed almost unreal.

They drove then to Mike's place,
not speaking until they got there.

"You had any supper?" Mike
asked.

"No."

"Me neither. You want to come in
for some? If I remember right, it was roasting ears and hot dogs."

"Sure," Marty said.

And they walked to the house,
where the windows were lighted with a soft glow from the candles and the
kerosene lamp. Inside, they found Rich and Ty sitting at the kitchen table.
They'd been playing a game of checkers.

"I don't think you guys know
each other," Mike said, and he introduced the three men.

Marty was still on the porch
kicking off his muddy shoes and pulling off his wet socks. He glanced up at
them now and stood there in his bare feet.

"Any supper left?" Mike said,
and Ty went to the stove, bringing back plates full of food.

"It's not even warm anymore," he
said.

"Don't matter," Mike said. "I've
had worse." And he picked up a hot dog with his fingers to bite the end off it.

Marty said nothing for a while,
just "Thanks" when he took his plate from Ty.

Mike noticed Rich and Ty
sneaking looks at Marty as he sat down at the table to eat. For more than two weeks
now, since the two of them had come to the farm, there hadn't been anybody else
around.

They hadin a manner of
speakingtaken the opportunity to get to know each other about as well as any
two guys like them could. These days they were never separated. They worked
together, swam together in the pool, went for long walks along the cornfields out
to the river together, and certainly slept together.

Finding them stretched out on
the couch watching TVone leaning back between the other's legsMike
couldn't help but think of Danny and the many nights the two of them had done
the same thing, not being able to sit apart, wanting each other's bodies
pressed together and not ever getting enough of it.

Tyfor all his hurt and
confusion, after leaving his churchhad been the first to reach out. Though
the younger of the two, he had seen through Rich's tough exterior to the
troubled man inside. The same impulse, Mike guessed, that had made him want to
serve others as a minister had drawn him to Rich.

And he hadn't given up, even
when Rich remained distant and cold, lost in the darkness he'd brought back
with him from Vietnam.
Ty would talk to him, bring him coffee, encourage him to eat, and even when he
didn't want any of this, Ty would just sit with him, keeping him company
through the nights, like the worst thing for Rich would be to leave him alone.

"You got courage, you know
that?" Mike had said to Ty.

"I do?" Ty had said with all his
innocence.

"Most people would have just
quit on Rich by now. But you hang in there."

"I'm not most people, I guess."

"You sure as heck aren't."

And when he thought that Ty
would probably never get a response out of Richthe man who had seen and done
too much, too far from home to ever come backsomething had happened. A light
had flickered on inside, and the kindness of a young man with his own troubles
had brought him to life again.

The tenderness for Ty that then slowly
emerged from Rich warmed Mike's heartit was the first sign that the boy he'd
once known years ago was coming out of hiding. He would discover the two of
them leaning against a corral fence, looking out across the fields and talkingor
not talking, Mike couldn't tell from a distanceRich's arm across Ty's
shoulders.

Once Mike had stepped into the
barn and found the two of them in a long embrace, kissing. They hadn't seen him
come in, and he ducked out again. Rich had even taken to holding Ty's hand at
odd moments, the two of them walking across the place, riding with Mike
somewhere in the pickup, or sitting at the kitchen table eating supper.

As the days passed, he saw the
care and desperation begin to fade from Rich's face, and every once in a while
there'd be the trace of a smile.

Ty, meanwhile, was smiling
almost all the time. He was like a man sprung from prison. If he had any doubts
or concerns, they would show up rarely as a thoughtful expression and a long gaze
across the room, but Rich would reach over to him and touch his thumb to Ty's
forehead, wiping away the beginnings of a frown.

How they began to look after
each other was a wonder. There were hardly two men Mike knew of who needed it
more.

That they had fallen in love was
plain as day. Mike simply let it happen and said nothing, like if he did it would
suddenly all vanish.

Their presence now in the
kitchen, faces warmly lighted by the kerosene lamp and the candles, was the
calm center of a stormy night that enclosed the farmhouse in darkness, under a
starless sky, with only the faraway glimmer of lightning in the distance.

It was such a peaceful moment, all
of them around the table, the game of checkers waiting where they had left it. Mike finished his
plate of food and sat there, with a cup of lukewarm coffee, and listened as the
three others talked.

It was like going back in a time
machine to fifty years ago, before electricity, when farm people at the end of
a hard day's work had nothing to do but sit in the lamplight with each other
for company. He glanced up to the kitchen clock, stopped at the moment the
power had failed and realized that back in those days there would be the sound
of an old Big Ben ticking somewhere in the house, keeping track of the hours.

"You live around here?" Ty asked
Marty.

"My dad's farm is up the road,"
Marty said, pointing over his shoulder. He explained how he was back from Alaska
and only home for
a while, and he told them about milking cows for Tully.

Rich wanted to know about Alaska, and it went on
from there. But if Marty was curious about Rich and Ty, he didn't say much of anything
to show it.

After a while, Mike stood up,
ready to get the generator loaded onto the truck. And just then the lights came
back on. It was 1972 again.

 § 

"Rich and Ty live with you?"
Marty said.

Mike was driving him back to
Tully's, to get his pickup and go on home to his folks' place.

"No," Mike laughed. "They're
just visiting."

Since that didn't really explain
much, he expected another question, maybe one that asked him to account in some
way for the affection that the two of them obviously felt for each other.

But instead, Marty said,
"Where's Danny?"

"In Lincoln," Mike said and explained about the
course Danny was taking at the university. "But he's done on Saturday. Then he
comes home."

"It's kind of like a fraternity
at your house," Marty said.

"How's that?"

"Men who are brothers," Marty
said. "And every one of them's welcome
under the same roof."

"Sounds like a good thing."

Marty didn't answer right away.
"It's supposed to be," he finally said, but with an odd note in his voice.

"It's not always?" Mike asked.

"No."

They'd got back to Tully's. The
pole light had come on, casting a pool of blue-white light over the barn and
the corrals and over Marty's truck parked by the barn door. The lights inside
glowed in the windows, and a few cows still stood in the shed looking out into
the misty drizzle.

"You miss all that?" Mike said.

"School? Sometimes."

"Think you'll go back?" Mike
asked, thinking of how Danny had changed his mind about college and finally
returned to finish his last year.

Mike let this comment hang there
between them, like he was weighing it carefullywhich he was. This seemed
exactly like something a boy should be able to say to his father, and here was Marty
wanting to keep it from him.

"Maybe you have to let your dad
be right about something once in a while."

Marty looked at him, as if he
thought Mike was making some kind of joke.

"What's he gonna do?" Mike said.
"Say I told you so and chuck you out?"

"You got that right."

"How could a father do that to
his own son?"

"You don't know my father."

"Maybe I do a little, better
than you think," Mike said, not ready yet to give up. "You want me to have a talk
with him?"

"Hell, no. What good would that
do?"

"If he really knew how much you
was hurtin' inside right now, I think he'd start to come around."

Marty turned and stared out his
window, like there was something in the dim light to see out there.

"And I can tell you're hurtin',"
Mike said. "It don't take no college degree to see that."

Marty put his hand to the door
handle, like he was about to get out.

"Before you go, Marty, I wanna
say something," Mike said, not sure just what he was about to say. And he found
himself trying to express what he'd begun to feel for Marty in the few short
hours they'd spent together.

He'd known what it was like to
be Marty's ageabout twenty-one maybeand feel all alone in the world. No
good friend, no father he felt he could talk to.

"My dad wasn't like yours,
criticizing me. He just wasn't there at all," he said and explained how his
parents' divorce had changed his father and turned him away and into himself,
until he'd finally gone off for good and married another woman in another
state.

And he said as much as he could
about losing a best friend who'd been a buddy since they were boys. He talked
of the friends that had come and gone in the service, and how lonely he had
felt when he got out. The farm and the hard work had been the only thing to
keep him going.

"Many's the night I sat in my
kitchen there all alone wondering if I'd feel that way for the rest of my
life."

It was a story he wasn't used to
telling, because he never thought it was really anyone's businessfor a long
time, he hadn't even told Danny. A man does what he has to do, and he doesn't
complain about it.

"But I didn't stop hopin' for
the best," he said. "If I was your dad, I'd tell you the same thing."

Marty hadn't taken his hand from
the door handle, but he hadn't moved to get out either. He seemed to be letting
everything Mike said sink in.

"But you're not him," he finally said.

Now he stirred and opened the
door.

"Thanks for helping me out
tonight," he said as he got out, and before he closed the door, he looked at
Mike once more and said, "I wish you were my dad."

Then he closed it and walked
away.

Continued . . .

More stories. There are links to all the Mike and Danny stories, plus a conversation with the author, pictures of the characters, and some cowboy poetry at the Rock Lane Cooper home page. Click here.